


Cravings

by Tokyo_the_Glaive



Series: 21 Days of Darcy Lewis Crossovers and AUs Challenge [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pushing Daisies, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Olive doesn't watch her mouth, Talk about being fat, Talk about dieting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-06 00:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4200747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tokyo_the_Glaive/pseuds/Tokyo_the_Glaive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Darcy really likes the smell of pies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cravings

**Author's Note:**

> For day 3 of the challenge, with the prompt: “Every morning you walk in and inhale deeply then walk back out seriously just buy something already" Bakery!AU
> 
> This was supposed to be light and fluffy and happy and turned out a lot more serious than I intended. If I had time I’d rewrite it from scratch, but since this is a challenge and I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do for tomorrow, I’m going to leave it as is. Includes talk about weight (as in being over/under), dieting, and a moment of fat shaming. You have been warned.

_Just one more time_ , Darcy told herself.  _It’s not that weird.  No one even notices._   Steeling herself, Darcy shut her eyes and opened the doors.  A few steps inside, she took a deep breath, held it in, and fled.

Outside, Jane was laughing at her.

“What?” Darcy asked, smoothing down her hair.  Jane kept laughing.  “ _What_?”

“You,” Jane said.  “Just buy something already.”

Darcy scowled.  “I don’t want to buy anything.”  She started walking, and Jane had to jog to keep up with her.

“You walk in there every morning,” Jane said, “breathe in the smell of baked goods, and walk away.  Darcy, I think you need to buy something.”

“The Pie Hole bakes pies,” Darcy said, as if that explained everything.

“Then buy a pie.  I’ll share it with you.”

Darcy nearly tripped over a crack in the sidewalk.  “I,” she said, straightening herself, “am on a diet.”

Jane came to a full stop.  “Is that why all of the Pop Tarts are gone?”

Darcy stopped with her.  Technically, as Jane was her boss, there was no need to rush; she couldn’t be late if she came into work when her boss came in, particularly since they were living together for the time being.  Still, she felt itchy and uncomfortable, and she wanted to change the subject.

“Yes,” Darcy said, looking in the nearest window.  _A candy store_.  Perfect, just what she needed.  She was out of breath just from walking, and her stomach rumbled at the thought of candy.  _No,_ she amended.  _At the thought of pie_.  “I didn’t think you’d notice, anyway.  Since when do you actually think about food for yourself?”

Jane’s shoulders dropped.  “I’m not that bad at feeding myself.”  Darcy pulled a face.  “Am I really that bad?  You know, I was alive and eating before I met you.”

“Uh huh.” Darcy folded her arms.  “I know exactly what you were like, ‘alive and eating’.  Remember when you took me out to ‘dinner’ after you hired me?”

Jane’s face flushed.  “Don’t remind me,” she muttered, and that was the end of that.

* * *

Darcy was counting on Jane’s forgetfulness: Jane tended to forget almost anything that didn’t involve lasers, space, or grant money.  Unfortunately, Darcy hadn’t counted on Jane to only partially forget that one particular morning commute.

“Hey, Darcy, the Pie Hole is the one, right?” Jane called.

Darcy resisted the urge to lay her head on top of the very fragile and definitely homemade equipment sitting in front of her.

“Tell me you didn’t,” Darcy called back.  The smell hit her full in the nose, and Darcy groaned.  Jane had.

“Delivery from the Pie Hole!” came a high-pitched voice.  Darcy turned to find a very short, very tan, very blonde woman standing next to Jane, smiling madly with three enormous boxes.  “We’ve got pecan, apple, and chocolate cream!”  The woman’s smile widened.  “Aren’t you a lucky girl?  I wish my boss would buy me pies.  Of course, he makes the pies, but they’re not for me, they’re for the customers.”  She sighed, then brightened.  “Here!”

“Thanks,” Darcy said, somewhat sourly.  She took the boxes from the tiny woman.  “I don’t know how we’re going to get through all of these.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll manage.  Your boss is a bird, but I’m sure you’ve got room,” the woman said cheerfully.

Out of the corner of her eye, Darcy could see the exact moment Jane’s face transitioned from a sort of muted excitement at having done something nice for her intern to absolute horror as she remembered just why Darcy didn’t want pie in the first place.

“You know what, I don’t even like pie,” Darcy declared.  She picked up the boxes and dumped them in the nearest trashcan.  The pies slid in their boxes, and Darcy could see the apple one begin to ooze out of one corner as it was overturned.  “You can leave now,” she said to the short woman.

“Oh, I upset you, didn’t I?” the tiny woman said.  She wrung her hands.  “I didn’t mean to.  I don’t have a filter, most of the time.  See, I’m just supposed to be the waitress, but our delivery boy—he refuses to delivery further away than the city, so he’s not really a delivery _man_ —”

“You can go,” Jane echoed, a little more firmly.

The tiny woman cut herself off, muttered something, and walked away.

Darcy sat back down in her chair and set her head in her hands.

“Darcy,” Jane said ineffectually.  Darcy could hear Jane working to say something to make it better, but she was coming up with nothing.  “I’ll just take this out,” Jane finally said.  She picked up the trashcan with the three pies and left the room.

Moving the damnably fragile equipment out of the way, Darcy lay her head down on the table and took deep breaths.  When Jane came back, she was almost back to herself.

“That woman was wrong, you know,” Jane said, pulling up a chair next to Darcy.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Darcy said.

Jane fiddled with one of the wires that ran from a nearby computer to a device Darcy could never remember the name of.  “I know,” Jane said.  “But I want you to know anyway.  She was wrong.”

* * *

The next two days passed in something of a haze.  Jane and Darcy were both committed to making sure the pie episode was never repeated, mentioned, or remembered.  They changed their route without speaking of it.  They stayed together as much as possible, leaning over each other and tripping over each other in turn.  When they went out for food and Darcy got a salad, Jane copied her.  They hadn’t agreed on a routine, but they settled into one anyway, and the premise was simple: everything they did, they did the same way and together.

On the third day, the routine was broken by a tall pretty man and his short pretty companion.  They stood together at the door to Jane and Darcy’s shared research space.  Darcy had set up a camera to see who they were buzzing in, and the two looked up into it after ringing.

“Hi,” the man said, speaking loudly.  He waved once, then returned his hands to his pockets.  He looked awfully as if he were trying to avoid touching anything.  The woman, on the other hand, waved emphatically.  She wore dark sunglasses and an enormous hat to complement her flowery dress.  “May we come in?”

“Who are they?” Jane asked.  Darcy shrugged.  “They don’t look dangerous.  I’m letting them in.”

Jane unlocked the door, and the pair stepped inside.

“Oh,” the woman said.  “Wow.  Are you scientists?”

“Yes,” Jane and Darcy answered in unison.  They’d started doing that recently, too.

“Oh, the woman said again.  “What do you study?”  The man shoved his hands further in his pockets, and as his companion spoke, he looked at her with a look of complete adoration that Darcy had never seen on a human being.

“Astrophysics,” Jane said.  “Who are you?”

“Uh,” the man said.  “I’m Ned, and this is—” The woman made a face.  “This is my colleague,” the man amended.  “Did Olive come here a few days ago?”  He spoke as if someone had shoved a lemon in his mouth and told him that he couldn’t spit it out on pain of death.

“Who’s Olive?” Darcy asked.

“Never heard of her,” Jane said.

Ned’s shoulders sunk.  “Really?” he asked.

“Did she get the address wrong?” Ned’s companion asked him.  “It isn’t like Olive not to get details like that.  She’s a very detail-oriented person.”

“Who’s Olive?” Darcy repeated.

“Olive Snook,” Ned said.  “She works for me—that is, she’s a waitress, but sometimes she does deliveries—of pies, that is—”  He paused a moment to catch his breath.  “I own the Pie Hole,” he finished lamely.

“Oh,” Jane and Darcy said.  Jane stepped in front of Darcy.  Darcy felt a little like she was going to fall over.  “Yes, she was here.  I’d like you all to leave now.”

“We just wanted to apologize!” the woman piped up.  “She was totally out of line and we’re really sorry.”  She looked at the floor.

“It’s fine,” Darcy said.  “Forget about it.”

“No, really—”

“Yeah,” Darcy said.  “Forget about it.”

“Hey, aren’t you the girl who used to come in and smell the pies baking every morning?” Ned asked.  The woman he was with hit him with her hat.

“I’m on a diet,” Darcy said.  “I don’t do that any more.”

“Is that because of Olive?” the woman asked.

“No, it’s because I’m on a diet.”

The woman frowned.  “But you look great.”

Darcy smiled thinly.  “Tell that to Olive.”

“I will,” the woman said starchy.  “In many, many words.”  She softened a little as she smiled.  “Ned and I are really sorry about what happened.”

“Me, too,” Darcy said.

They stood for a moment, awkwardly waiting for someone to say anything.

Ned finally said, “Well, we better be getting back.  We hope you come back some day.  It really brightened up our day having you come in.  There aren’t that many people who are as passionate about pie as we are.”

* * *

Two weeks later, Jane and Darcy had switched to an almost exclusively nocturnal schedule.  They slept during the day, often in the lab itself, wrapped in blankets with the shutters pulled tight, and they stayed up all night watching the sky.

Darcy was increasingly tired, grumpy, and otherwise tetchy.  She was _hungry_.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Darcy said one morning.  Jane was halfway to sleep, but she woke back up at the sound of Darcy’s voice.

“What?” Jane asked.  Her voice was groggy with aborted sleep.

“This diet,” Darcy said.  She felt like crying.  “I feel terrible.  I’m so hungry, but if I quit, I’ll feel like a failure.”

Jane rolled over to hug her where they lay on the floor.  “You’re not a failure if you stop starving yourself.  Darcy, you feel bad because you’re hardly eating.”

“But I’m fat.” The admission had the tears prickling the corners of Darcy’s eyes.

“No, you’re not,” Jane said.  “Maybe you feel fat.  Maybe somebody told you that you’re fat because they were being a jerk.  But you are not fat.”

Darcy let a moment pass.  Jane squeezed her tighter.

“I want pie,” she said.

“Pie?” Jane asked.

“Pie,” Darcy confirmed, miserably.

“It’s seven o’clock in the morning,” Jane said.  Darcy was quiet.  “That means the Pie Hole is just opening, right?”

“I don’t want to go there.”

“We could get a delivery.”

“I don’t want to see that lady again.”  Darcy was aware that she sounded like a petulant child, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Jane propped herself up on one arm.  “I can pick them up, then.”

“No, really.  I shouldn’t.”

“You should do whatever you want to do.”

“But I’m fat.”

Jane gave her a look.  “You said you want pie.”

“Yes,” Darcy said.  “I’m starving.”

Jane stood up.  “I’ll just get one,” she promised.  “You don’t have to eat much if you don’t want to.  You’ve been so sad lately, and you’ve been starving yourself.  Treat yourself.”

Darcy put her hands on her face.  “I knew I shouldn’t have shown you that meme,” she said.

“I’ll be right back,” Jane said.

And that is how Jane and Darcy came to be sitting on the floor of their shared lab space at eight in the morning, eating pecan pie and cracking sleep-deprived jokes until they fell asleep.


End file.
